1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to database security. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for protecting data within a database table from unauthorized modification.
2. Related Art
As computer systems store ever-larger amounts of sensitive data, it is becoming increasingly important to protect this sensitive data from unauthorized accesses. This is an important problem. The global costs incurred from such database security breaches run to billions of dollars annually, and the cost to individual companies can be severe, sometimes catastrophic.
One of the major challenges in providing database security is to protect data from unauthorized modification. To protect data from unauthorized modification, database systems can encrypt sensitive data items. However, encrypting sensitive data items can be ineffective against administrative users who have access to the encryption key. Furthermore, a database typically stores data on some form of updatable media, such as a hard drive. An intruder having access to the hard drive and to the encryption key (e.g., a database administrator) can potentially modify the data stored on the hard drive, and can fool the database into thinking the data is authentic. Simply encrypting the data that is stored in a database does not solve this problem, because the intruder can replace the original encrypted data with his own encrypted data, using the same encryption key.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for effectively protecting data in a database from unauthorized modification, especially against intruders with administrative privileges.